All the Words We Know is Bruce Nash’s third novel, but his first with a commercial publisher. The intensely interior story follows Rose, an elderly woman with dementia who becomes convinced that the aged care facility she lives in is killing its residents. As the title suggests, the novel begins (and ends) with words, exploring the slippages in memory and meaning that make Rose an entertaining but unreliable narrator: “In the beginning is the whatitsname/what do you call them? Forget-me-nots/All in their unicorns. Uniforms.” Rose’s fixation on language is at the heart of the novel, which explores the way language can spark love, strip people of power and clarify or obfuscate meaning.
Rose’s monologuing is interrupted by her discovery of a potentially nefarious plot. Opening the book she uses to keep track of her daily activities, Rose discovers that a page is missing. This triggers a string of memories – something about injections, somebody hanging from something and somebody with a plastic bag over their head – all of them the last somethings these somebodies ever did. Her somewhat clumsy investigation into what she thinks has happened reveals secrets at an institutional level and within her own family, capturing the many ways in which elderly people, particularly those struggling with memory loss, are infantilised and stripped of their agency.
